Rate My Professor X.D. Li

Professor Xiang David Li is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Hong Kong. He earned his B.Sc. from Fudan University in 2003 and his Ph.D. from the University of Hong Kong in 2008. Following his doctoral studies, he served as a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University from 2008 to 2011 before joining the University of Hong Kong as faculty. He advanced to Associate Professor from 2016 to 2020 and was promoted to full Professor in 2020. His research focuses on chemical biology and drug discovery, particularly developing novel chemical tools to study protein-protein interactions, posttranslational modifications, epigenetics, and chemical proteomics for target identification. Li's group has pioneered methods to elucidate protein interaction networks in cellular contexts, enabling simultaneous identification and visualization of interacting partners. Notable achievements include the discovery of a new histone mark, H4K91glu, in collaboration with the School of Biological Sciences, and the development of first-in-class inhibitors targeting YEATS domain readers of histone acetylation.

Professor Li's contributions have been recognized with prestigious awards, including the NSFC Distinguished Young Scholars award, the NSFC Excellent Young Scientists Fund, membership in the Hong Kong Young Academy of Sciences, the Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award 2024 in Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry, and the HKU Outstanding Researcher Award 2023. His laboratory has published groundbreaking work in top journals, such as 'Menin reads H3K79me2 mark in a nucleosomal context' in Science (2023), a novel chemical tool for protein interaction networks in Molecular Cell (2021, 81, 2669), and discoveries of chromatin modifications in Molecular Cell (2019). These studies have advanced understanding of epigenetic regulation and protein dynamics, with over 3,299 citations on Google Scholar. Li also contributes to teaching courses like CHEM4148 and supervises postgraduate students in chemical biology.